Why Cultural Awareness Is Essential For Global Ai

Cultural Awareness in Global AI | Cohere Labs North Mini Code. Cohere's first model for developers. Learn more

Jun 23, 2026

6 minute read

Why Cultural Awareness is Essential for Global AI How users are impacted around the world by AI’s cultural gaps

Key takeaways While modern LLMs are increasingly multilingual, language coverage alone is not enough to guarantee culturally aware and capable LLMs. As AI rapidly develops, digitally underrepresented cultures and communities will be at risk of being excluded from these technologies. We conducted a survey to find out how users around the world are most impacted by AI’s gaps in cultural understanding. Many users report the need to switch from their primary language to English in order to use AI systems. They report receiving inadequate answers due to lack of cultural understanding, and even report instances of AI violating their cultural norms. Many users additionally share concerns of further marginalization of their culture in the future. Cultural awareness needs to be a core component of AI systems in order to respect and serve the needs of users globally.

Why culture matters Culture underpins every aspect of human communication ranging from linguistic formality to societal norms. While today’s LLMs are increasingly multilingual, language coverage alone does not guarantee us multicultural awareness. Language is simply not an adequate proxy for culture. Previous studies have shown that as AI rapidly develops, digitally underrepresented cultures and communities are increasingly excluded from these technologies, and at increased risk of bias and misinformation. Further studies have demonstrated that AI systems often default to culturally dominant groups within languages (e.g., associating French primarily with France over other Francophone regions), context-switch to neighboring higher resource languages or regions (e.g., responding in Bengali when prompted in Assamese), and reinforce Western-Centric perspectives and narratives .

When AI is used as a companion to help us navigate cross-cultural interactions— international job interviews, workplace collaboration, or customer service exchanges –-can inadvertently cause harm when cultural differences are not properly understood. The real-world problem In our daily use of AI tools, we rarely think consciously about the role of cultural understanding in our interactions. But when major misunderstandings occur, when AI tools just don’t “get” our context, when we have to meticulously explain how our situation is different from the situations that AI models have learned to assume as default— then often the culprit is a lack of cultural understanding.

So which contexts specifically require cultural awareness? Do users have to find workarounds to make AI work for their use cases? To find the answers to these questions, we conducted a survey to understand how individuals from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds experience AI systems, particularly large language models (LLMs) like chat-based or generative AI tools. For the purposes of this study, we did not require participants to specify which AI models they referred to in their responses, and assume that these responses cover a broad range of frontier models given the diversity of participant occupations and regions.

We focused on understanding three main objectives: (1) identifying situations where cultural awareness is crucial in real-world AI interactions, (2) evaluating whether current AI systems adequately reflect social norms, communication styles, local knowledge, and cultural references across different cultures, and (3) documenting any cultural awareness limitations users encounter.

Our online survey recruited participants via social media platforms and research community outreach. All participation was voluntary and responses were collected anonymously and with consent to release aggregated results and quotes. What the data shows We received 81 responses in total from participants from over 22 countries around the world. Approximately half of participants (48.7%) were aged 25–34, with the remaining participants distributed across age groups ranging from 16 to 64 years old. While the majority of participants are fully fluent in English, over 80% of participants indicated regularly communicating in languages other than English. Our survey participants are regular users of AI: the large majority uses AI (85.2%) at least on a daily (if not hourly) basis, and only 3.7 percent use AI sporadically (less than weekly). Half of our participants work in the tech sector or engineering where coding agents are the most frequent use. The language switching problem Of the participants that indicated that their primary language was not English (83%), 89.5% reported switching from their primary language when interacting with AI. The main reason for switching was the perceived higher quality and accuracy of responses, with English being the most commonly adopted alternative language. This is alarming, because it means that the AI Language Gap hinders AI tools to have the same utility for users that are not proficient in English. Where AI falls short Over one-third of respondents (38%) felt that AI does not adequately understand their cultures, giving a score of <5 out of 10. When asked which tasks participants would like to use AI for more, but currently do not due to lack of cultural awareness, the top answers were writing-based tasks of creative writing, translation, and communication writing. Local information look-up, practical guidance, legal and government-related tasks, social media content generation, and medical health questions, were also reported to lack cultural awareness. We additionally asked participants to describe typical failure cases. See some examples below: Language Localized to Task Prompt Problem explanation

kajkavian croatian Croatia Local information look-up "jel jedanaestica vozi" ("does tram eleven have issues) impossible to get an answer, but in toronto and english if i ask about line 2 using its many nicknames green line or blood line or danforth line, all those come back with the correct answer

English Egypt General knowledge "what is the average cost of a wedding" estimation are not related to to actual events and costs and current status of my society

French Québec Food/Recipe "Est-ce que tu peux me donner une recette facile à faire, je n&#x27;ai que 10 minutes pour cuisiner." The model will...